Will, Vitality, Deficiency

Spinoza characterizes the vitality of a Mode in a variety of ways--1. 'Desire' or 'appetite'; 2. Transition from passive to active; 3. Transition from imperfect to perfect; 4. The maintaining of structural integrity; and 5. Instance of God's vitality, i. e. of 'natura naturans'. However, the relations between the five are unclear, e. g. between 4 and 2 or 3, and, more significantly, between 5 and the others. For, the first four each entail a possibly distinctive deficiency, whereas God's vitality is a self-sufficiently incessant process. So, furthermore, the intuition of God, which entails the realization that one's vitality is a modification of God's, seems to expose the others as inadequate ideas of that vitality. In contrast, here, the distinctions between the 5 disappear, because vitality consists in Evolvement, not in Self-Preservation, which is a minimal special case of Evolvement, i. e. Evolvement entails Will, which is a principle of Excession, and, hence, is a striving-beyond that is not an expression of a deficiency.